In the Garden of Sin (22 page)

Elic was all in black—jeans, boots, T-shirt, and zippered hoodie.

A hoodie. They’d been out clubbing, from the looks of it— probably one of the local fetish joints, given the dog collar— and he’d worn a fucking hoodie. Faded, no less.

He was telling the other couple in slightly accented English that he and Lili lived in France but kept a pied-à-terre here in New York. Their friend Inigo used it frequently; they only stayed there once or twice a year.

“Cities aren’t my thing,” Lili said.

Lili.

Goddess. Succubus. Witch. Whore. She’d been all of these things—or rather, been regarded as all of these things—at some point during her long existence, but tonight…

Ah, tonight she looked every inch the goddess, in ornate golden earrings that tickled her shoulders and a dress of aubergine velvet, her sheaf of sleek black hair spilling over one shoulder all the way to her waist. Her only jewelry aside from the earrings was something she had been wearing when he first knew her in 1749: a circlet of hammered gold around her left ankle, from which dangled a gold-rimmed disc of lapis lazuli. She had quite possibly been wearing it for thousands of years.

And her eyes… those drowsy-dark, mesmerizing eyes… How many hours had Turek spent curled up on his pallet of
rotted straw in that rank little cell in Paris, picturing the profound relief in those eyes as they’d carted him away from Château de la Grotte Cachée in chains? Elic had been watching that day, too, his long arms curled around Lili as if to thumb his nose at Turek for having lost her to him.

Like Turek, Lili had been visiting Grotte Cachée with Sir Francis and his followers, whose orgies and black masses had provided an outlet for the incessant lust that held all succubi and incubi in its grip. But then she’d met Elic, and you would have to have been deaf, dumb, and blind not to have seen how besotted they were with each other. Turek had wondered if she would remain behind with him when the Hellfires bid adieu to Grotte Cachée and returned to England; it would appear that she had.

He realized he wasn’t breathing. Astounding, that she should have such an effect on him after all these years.

As the cab disappeared down the street, Chalk-stripe said, “Maybe we should have taken it.”

“Our place is just a few blocks away, off St. Mark’s in the East Village,” replied Elic, taking Lili’s hand. “And it’s such a pleasant night.”

“The pleasure has barely begun.” Chalk-stripe stroked Lili’s hair, caressing her breast as he did so.

Lili glanced at Pixie-cut, who was staring fixedly at the ground, then met Elic’s gaze with a look of concern that provoked a smirk from Turek. He would never understand the sentimental concern that some Follets harbored for human-folk; they were livestock, not pets.

“Are you cool with this, Nicky?” Elic asked.

“She’s fine with it,” Chalk-stripe said as he slid an arm around Lili’s waist.

“I asked
her”
Elic said.

“She defers to me in everything.”

“But I don’t.” Lifting Nicky’s chin, Elic said, “Do you want to do this? No, don’t look at Doug. Do you?”

Lowering her gaze, she said, very softly but with a sincerity that sounded real, “Yes, sir.”

“This is the first time I’ve shared her,” Doug said, “but she’s known to expect it. And trust me, she loves nothing better than to please her master. Here.” He handed the leash to Elic. “See how it feels in your hand. You may find you like it.”

They continued on, turning right at West Fourth. Turek followed them, keeping to the shadows as they strolled past Washington Square, then north on Broadway and east on Astor Place toward the East Village.

Forty years
.

He’d spent forty long, dismal, famished years in that goddamned prison, forty years that were lost to him, and which he would never get back. And all because of Lili. He’d revered her as the archetype of her race, begged her to let him turn her into what he was so that she could become his queen, his eternal companion. Just as humans fed on the lower beasts, he’d told her, so vampires fed on humans. He’d explained that it was the natural order, the way of the world, yet she couldn’t be swayed. Not only had she declined to “spend eternity as a murderous little maggot like you,” she had condemned him to a hell on earth deep in the bowels of the Bastille, subsisting on the blood of rats as he grew steadily more desiccated… and half mad in the bargain.

To this day, every time Turek heard a casual reference to “Bastille Day,” or “the storming of the Bastille,” it made his stomach clutch. To his fellow prisoners, always few in number, most of them depraved aristocrats locked up at the request of their own families, life in the formidable old fortress wasn’t half bad. It was certainly preferable to the alternative of a public jail or asylum. They had spacious accommodations, most
of them, plus personal servants, cooks, barbers, physicians… Their every need was attended to.

Not so Turek, who was locked up indefinitely on a
lettre de cachet
, which meant that no formal charges need ever be filed. He was meant to simply disappear from the face of the earth. They didn’t even enter his name on the prison rolls—not even the assumed name under which they’d incarcerated him: the Comte de Lorges. As far as his guards knew, he was a murderous madman who’d raped, killed, and eaten three of his own children, plus two nieces and a nephew—or was it two nephews and a niece? These monstrous if fictitious crimes had earned him a Hannibal-worthy cell deep in the labyrinthine undercroft of the Bastille.

Turek was permitted to move freely about his little crypt except when it was time to sweep out and replace the straw, at which point half a dozen burly guards armed with torches— for they’d been told of the lunatic count’s aversion to fire— would lock him into manacles and leg irons embedded in the walls of weeping rock. There were no windows in his cell, just an iron door with a barred opening and a slot through which his food was pushed by the few guards who knew of his existence, and who were forbidden to speak to him or to speak to others about him.

The food wasn’t bad—they fed Turek what they fed the other prisoners—but it wasn’t enough to sustain him. Or di nary food is low-grade fuel to an Upír. It will keep his bodily functions slogging along, but without regular infusions of high test—without rich human blood—he will grow steadily more emaciated and dehydrated, as indeed Turek did.

By July 14, 1789, when the Bastille was besieged by a horde of rabid revolutionaries looking for weapons, Turek was gaunt and frail, with a ragged beard down to his waist and a great shock of long, strawlike hair. Even in his little subterranean
wormhole, he could hear the muffled drone of a huge, excited crowd surrounding the prison. He heard the pounding of battering rams and bursts of gunfire, sometimes followed by shrieks and groans.

Isolated as he was from the world at large, he had no idea at the time who these attackers were, only that, for some unfathomable reason, they seemed to want
in
. After several hours of this assault, there came a triumphant roar and the thunder of hundreds of feet overhead as the attackers swarmed into the building. He heard people yelling about freeing the prisoners and realized he had an opportunity to escape from that stinking hole if only he could make his presence known. Standing at his door, he screamed through the little barred window until, at long last, a man and a woman appeared in the torchlit gloom of the antechamber beyond his cell.

The woman, thick-boned and with a great froth of red hair, carried a bloody ax and a ring of keys; her cohort, a large knife. He was berating her for having killed one of their fellow
vainqueurs
for those keys just so that she might have the glory of finding the mammoth cache of gunpowder, a dozen tons or more, rumored to be secreted somewhere within those thick stone walls. He called her a murderess who would get her comeuppance when he revealed what she had done. She called him a sniveling, traitorous coward.

The man barred Turek’s cell door with his body when she went to unlock it. “This one’s name isn’t on the list. We don’t know who he is or what he’s done.”

“I made myself the enemy of an important person,” Turek said in a voice rusty from disuse and all that screaming. It was the truth, if only a minuscule portion of it. “They don’t want anyone to know about me.”

“You see?” the woman told her companion. “We’ll be heroes if we free him. He’s unjustly imprisoned, a martyr.”

“Or a very great villain who is also a great liar. You’re mad to want to unlock that door. You’re mad to have killed Guillaume. I’m going to report you to the Assembly, and then we shall see how heroic you are.”

“Pascal,” she said softly, reaching out to stroke his cheek. “Put down that knife,
mon chéri
. You wouldn’t use that on me, would you? You wouldn’t hurt a woman.”

He hesitated, then lowered his knife and started to say something.

She stepped back and swung her ax, catching it in his neck. He fell, twitching and kicking, but not a sound issued from him. She kicked him out of the way, unlocked the door, and swung it open.

She said, “You’re a free man, comrade. How long have they kept you here?”

“Forty years.”

“Mon dieu!
You haven’t seen the sun in forty years?”

“And glad of it. It’s not the sun I’ve been craving.”

She gave him a puzzled look.

Turek grabbed her head and slammed it against the wall just hard enough to knock her out without cracking her skull. He managed to get her wrists locked into the manacles hanging from the wall over her head, thus lifting her off her feet. She started screaming as she came to and realized what was happening to her, so he gagged her with a strip of blanket before he began to feed.

She struggled at first, of course, especially when he shoved her skirts up and rammed himself into her, but then the blood-haze overtook her, and she fucked him with wanton gusto. What sheer heaven it was to relieve four decades of pent-up hunger and lust as he drained her dry.

Thus rejuvenated, Turek used Pascal’s knife to hack off his hair and beard, stole the murdered man’s
sans-culotte
revolutionary
garb—pantaloons, short jacket, clogs, and red “cap of liberty”—and disappeared among the howling throng.

The Anton Turek who’d been “liberated” from that hellhole was not quite the same Anton Turek who’d been locked up there four decades before. The lingering remnants of civilized humanity that he’d retained following his vampiric conversion in 1348 had withered in the face of his consuming fury.

He had thought about Lili ceaselessly during that interminable captivity, her taunts echoing in his skull, stoking his rage.
You’re just some vile little bloodsucking insect, a mosquito with delusions of magnificence… a bedbug, scuttling about in the dark, antennae twitching at the scent of blood…

He’d spent hundreds of hours, thousands, imagining how he would end that bitch’s existence if he ever crossed paths with her again. With most Follets, the only sure method of execution was thorough combustion, with the flesh not just charred but roasted past the point of regeneration. Almost all vampires were susceptible not only to fire but to the ultraviolet light emitted by the sun. Some vampire subraces had other weaknesses, as well. There were bloodsuckers, for example, who could be killed by decapitation, by driving a stake through their hearts, or by other, more esoteric means. Turek and Galiana were more fortunate; they could be done in only by fire or lengthy exposure to sunlight.

Lili’s only Achilles’ heel, as far as Turek knew, was fire. He had envisioned a hundred different scenarios in which she would burn to death slowly, writhing in well-deserved agony.

For some time after his release from the Bastille, he’d tried to locate Château de la Grotte Cachée in order to exact his revenge on her, but it was remarkably secluded for a castle of that size, tucked deep into a valley in the volcanic highlands of Auvergne. Despite his previous visit, he’d found himself
utterly at a loss when confronted with the tangle of unmarked roads that crisscrossed the densely forested region—which was particularly irksome, as he’d always prided himself on his sense of direction. The local inhabitants were useless. Time and again, he heard the same refrain, accompanied by a Gallic shrug.
Un château? Non, je suis désolé, monsieur. Je ne sais pas un château
.

After an exhaustive and perplexing search—it was as if Grotte Cachée had been sucked into the very earth—he’d finally come to accept that he would never see Lili again, never make her pay for what she’d done to him.

And now, here she was at last, all these many years later, quite literally leading him right to her doorstep. There were no thick stone walls to hide behind here, no Swiss Guards to do her bidding. There was Elic, who had proven a formidable enemy in the past, preternaturally strong and determined to protect Lili at all costs, but if Turek was clever, he could think of some way to take that bastard out.

And then, at long last, Ilutu-Lili would be his to do with as he pleased. He would torment her as Galiana tormented her pigeons. He would make her suffer. He would revel in her screams of anguish.

And he would smile as the flames reduced her, after thousands of years of existence, into cold, gray bone and ash.